Post on 24-Feb-2023
Isabelle DuVall
… Are we still in the game?:
The Collapse of Meaning in David Cronenberg’s Existenz
The world of David Cronenberg’s 1999 scifi film eXistenZ centers around virtual reality
games played on biological game pods, the people that play them, and the games creators.
Throughout the course of the film, the characters in eXistenZ, as well as the audience, are faced
with various forms of abjection and the abject, forcing a collapse of meaning. Existenz creates
an effective collapse of meaning through the use of penetration anxiety, the convergence of the
organic and the machine, the manipulation of the characters’ identities, and the employment of
multiple layers of reality. Cronenberg creates instability at every turn, simultaneously enacting
the death of subjecthood, representation, and physicality. In analyzing key scenes from the film,
the breakdown of distinctions and meanings become evident and effectively serve to highlight
the transformative possibilities of technology.
Some brief facts and plot points: The film begins in an unspecified church, where a
focus group has formed to try out the new virtual reality game, eXistenZ. The game is played
collectively by connecting via bioports, holes located at the base of the spine which attach the
game pod to the gamer via an umbilical cordlike plug. Referred to as “metaflesh”, the pod
itself is composed of a fleshlike material, composed of genetically mutated amphibian organs.
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The game designer, beloved by die hard gamers, Allegra Gellar is there to commence the
experiment. The group plugs into the game, while on the stage their unnecessary bodies are left
vulnerable. Only moments into the game, a member of the audience takes out an unidentifiable
weapon, shouting “Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!” He shoots Allegra in the shoulder
and within seconds he is brutally shot to death by undercover security. It is later made clear that
the assailant was member of the fundamentalist group known as “the Realist Underground”.
The realists oppose the gaming world for it’s corrosive effects on perceptions of reality, and
they view Allegra as the figurehead of the evil industry. His weapon turns out to be an entirely
organic gun loaded with human teeth, we discover by witness Pikul dig out the presumed bullet
from Allegra’s shoulder on the side of the road.
1 http://cronenbergmuseum.tiff.net/collaborateurs_13collaborators_13eng.html
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Allegra flees the scene with Ted Pikul, a marketing trainee for Antenna Research (the gaming
corporation), who has never played a game himself. The attack rendered her game vulnerable,
and in order to ensure it’s integrity, she has to test it with another friendly player. Ted, being the
only candidate, does not possess and bioport and must be fitted with one. As they enter the
game, begin playing, and exit and reenter to pause it, the distinctions between reality and
virtuality becomes more and more obscured. The final scenes reveal that the entire film thus far
has taken place in a second game, trandscenDenZ, in which Ted and Allegra are both players
(different identities, same names) in another focus group. It is revealed that the two are
themselves realist assassins who proceed to shoot up Yevgeny Nourish, the (supposedly) real
star designer. The final scene ends with one scared participant posing the question “tell me the
truth, are we still in the game?”, suggesting the impossibility of ever knowing which of the
films layers is “real”.
The first way in which this film exposes the viewer to the abject is manifest in Ted
Pikul’s penetration phobia. Upon escaping from the church, Allegra Geller is shocked to find
out that her fleeing partner, Ted Pikul, has not been fitted for a bioport. While he seems to be
interested in Allegra’s games, he has not undergone the installation of the bioport because of
“this phobia about having my body penetrated.” While she claims it’s a simple, noninvasive
procedure akin to getting ones ears pierced, Pikul maintains that it is “just too freaky, makes 2
my skin crawl.” Pikul’s other concern is of the potential for infection, “How come bioports
don’t get infected? I mean...they open right into your body.” Allegra demonstrates
2 While I refer to Allegra Geller by her first name, I refer to Ted Pikul by his last name because this is how he is addressed by Allegra Geller, to his dismay. As the two are about the port into the game for the first time, Pikul says “Don’t you think you could call me Ted?”, Allegra replies, “Maybe afterwards”. (Cronenberg, eXistenZ, 00:28:10)
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ridiculousness of his worry by opening her mouth: an example of a bodily opening that seldom
causes infections (and is also an erogenous zone).
Through Pikul’s character, Cronenberg evokes
the abject by reminding us of our own bodily
vulnerability. There is also a rupture produced between
us, the audience, and the character Pikul, as he shares
our ignorance, naivety, and horror of the virtual reality
game and all its fixing. Visually, the bioport itself is uncanny; it recalls an anus, or maybe a
vaginal opening. Either way, abjection is present through associations with bodily waste and
birth. It is an orifice that Pikul is extremely reluctant to have penetrated. “In eXistenZ the
bioport is at once receptacle and porthole, socket and port, a twoway, interactive, living
channel and the body’s most blatantly erogenous zone.” The dual purposes of the bioport as a 3
vagina and an anus, and the penetration anxiety they evoke, are made explicit in the three
following scenes.
The two stop at a country gas station, whose literal signage reads “Country Gas Station”,
to have Pikul’s bioport fitted. His obvious apprehension over the procedure is heightened by the
fact that he is in having it done by a mechanic, in a car shop, as opposed a sterile operating
room.
3 Teresa de Lauretis, “Becoming Inorganic,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2003): 559, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/377720>. .
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His male fear of penetration is also intensified in the large size of the phallic tool used, and in
the stance of the operation, with the operator domineeringly standing over the subject, who is
forced into a submissive position. Following the fitting, Pikul has a minor freakout when he
cannot feel his legs, and we learn that the procedure comes with a ‘built in” epidural. This adds
yet another emasculating element to Pikul’s traumatic experience whilst reinforcing abject
themes of pregnancy and birth.
After Pikul has his (second) bioport installed, Allegra urges him to play the game with
her. Pikul grasps a support beam as Allegra fingers his new orifice. “It hurts. I think its
infected” Pikul asserts. “Its not infected. It’s just
excited. It wants some action” Allegra says as she
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licks her finger and inserts it into the virginal bioport, probing the wound of Pikul’s trauma.
Pikul reactions, “But I really don't think I want action! Me, I mean. The bearer of the excited
bioport.” Aside from the overt eroticism of this gesture, the breaching of Pikul’s bodily
boundaries alone evokes the abject. Again, he is feminised both by being physically penetrated
but also sexually dominated by a female. Allegra’s aggression and sexuality bring to mind the
robotic Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Both character’s overt, female sexualtiy
threaten the patriarchal order.
Upon entering eXistenZ, or so we are led to believe, Pikul and Allegra find themselves in a
video store. There, they receive micropods small enough to be inserted directly into their
bioports. After inserting the micropod into Allegra’s bioport, Pikul erotically tongues the hole.
This scene reinforces the bioport as an erogenous zone that signals at the abject in that it is
genitallike but also because it is alien. Located at the fairly unsexy small of the back, the
bioport lacks gender, orientation, it cannot reproduce, and despite the fact that the pod is organic
material, the orifice seems inorganic in it’s function (especially when Allegra lubricates Pikuls’
with a can of wd40). This uncanny nature of the bioport creates ruptures in the meaning and
order of gender roles, sexuality, and identity.
While the penetration phobia
experienced by Pikul highlights the
anxiety of our vulnerable, material
bodies, the bioport also touches on the
penetration of the mind. The players
both plug into a shared pod via
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Umbycords. When plugged in, the gamers collectively create and fuel the virtual reality. As the
state of their mind affects the architecture of the game, their bodies supply power and energy.
Allegra first reminds the focus group and later Pikul not to panic, as panicking whilst plugged in
causes a “neural surge”. Therefore, eXistenZ fragments both the order of the physical and
mental self.
Throughout the film, the effect of collapsed meaning is heightened in the clouding of
distinctions between the artificial and the organic. Lacan asserted that “animals are caught in the
gaze of the world...humans are not so reduced to this “imaginary capture”, for we have access to
the symbolic.” 4
4 Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78, Autumn (1996): 109, <http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/stable/778908.>
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As the distinctions fade between human, animal, and machine, the abject effect is heightened.
One way this effect is produced is by the concurrent mutation of both animals and humans. The
game pods are composed of the harvested organs of genetically mutated amphibians, making
them literal software. The appearance of the pod itself bring to mind a uterus and, in one
particular scene, a stillbirth. It has a few buttons
that are reminiscent of nipples or clitorises,
especially when they are flicked on. The aptly
named “Umbycord” that connects to both the pod
and the bioports is undeniably umbilical. While the
amphibians are mutated for the purpose of the
game, likewise humans are fitted with bioports in order to play. The combination of the bioport
and the pod carry connotations to the abject as both “...a representation of the body turned
inside out, of the subject literally abjected, thrown
out....also the condition of the outside turned in, of
the invasion of the subjectaspicture by the
objectgaze.” In arguably the most gag inducing 5
scene of the entire film, Pikul consumes a large
platter of the mutated amphibians with his hands.
According to Kristeva, “food loathing is perhaps
the most elementary and most archaic form of
abjection” . The same amphibians that comprise 6
5 Ibid, 112. 6 Julia Kristeva, Power of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.
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the mechanic game pods are somehow also a delicacy. In this scene, there is an apparent loss of
distinction between human, animal, and machine as he appears to let go of primal repression
and devours the platter in a matter of minutes, slurping up fluids from the bones. “The abject
confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of
animal.” 7
Even more abject is the fact that Pikul himself is repulsed, but he cannot stop. Part of playing
eXistenZ is playing the role of your character, and the character’s predetermined actions cannot
be fought. This loss of agency (discussed in depth later on) can be likened to the Lacanian gaze,
7 Kristeva, Power of Horrors, 12.
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and raises the question of whether you are playing the game, or the game is playing you. As
Pikul continues to eat, he instinctually begins assembling a weapon out of the amphibian bones.
It appears to be the same organic pistol that was used by Allegra’s assassin at the start of the
film. The obfuscation of the boundaries between man and machine creates a powerful uncanny
effect in which “there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily
existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot
teleology and human goals.” 8
Another way in which Cronenberg collapses meaning is in the manipulation of the game
character’s identities. In their initial entry into eXistenZ, as mentioned before, Pikul and Allegra
are in a video game shop where the owner greets them and asks to assist them. After some
dialogue, the character falls silent as his face blurs over. Allegra explains that he is caught in a
“game loop”, and they must utter the right phrase to trigger his next line of dialogue. These
characters in the game seem and look human, but exist and act only as tools to advance the
game and the gamer forward. “Many of the human characters in this film exist simply as sites of
information exchange material entities produced by and teeming with swarms of others. In
short, eXistenZ does not render the human as an object that connects to other objects, but as an
effort of moment of multiple “inhuman” connectionsconnections that are always on their way
elsewhere.” Pikul himself experiences a collapse in subjecthood when he shouts “It’s none of 9
your business who sent us! We’re here and that is all that matters…” followed by shock, “God,
what happened? I didn’t mean to say that.” Allegra explains, “it’s your character who said
8 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2–3. 9 John Muckelbauer and Debra Hawhee, "Posthuman Rhetorics: "It's the Future, Pikul"," JAC 20.4 (2000): 768, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866364.>
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it...it’s kind of a schizophrenic feeling, isn’t it?” The loss of agency witnessed in this scene,
heightened by Pikul’s visible horror of the experience, confronts the viewer with a regression of
subjecthood that “goes beyond the infantile to the inorganic.” The schizophrenic analogy, 10
Foster points out, has been utilized by the postmodern theorists such as Fredric Jameson and
JeanFrancois Lyotard. “The extreme spacetime compressions produced by globalized
communication technologies give rise to a perception of the everyday as fundamentally
destabilizing and excessive.” This theory of the postmodern condition is taken a step further 11
by Jeremy Rifkin, who has argued that the commodification of personal experiences, where
every activity outside of the familial is a paidfor experience , will lead to multiple, fragmented 12
10 Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” 120. 11 Simon Morley, The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press, 2010), 12. 12Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: the New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where all of Life is a PaidFor Experience (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000), 9.
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consciousnesses that can be utilized in accordance with whatever virtual reality one would find
oneself in. This feeds into the the notion of the posthuman: a person that exists in a state beyond
the current notions of human subjectivity and selfhood. Within these theories, it would seem
that the increasing intergretation of the virtual in the real will, or already has, called for a totally
new definition of identity.
Perhaps the most haunting element of eXistenZ is the extreme confusion created by the
disorienting effect the game has on the characters perception of reality. Pikul is the central point
of this confusion in the film, due to his complete lack of experience with the gaming world.
Allegra, his guide into this new hobby of reality bending, assures him that what he is feeling is
just “a bad case of first time user anxiety”. This does absolutely nothing to quell Pikul’s
concerns, which remain with him throughout the entirety of the film.
Pikul’s main concern with the bending of reality is always tied to his concern with
bodies; particularly his own. He states that he is “worried about [his] body, is it hungry, is it in
danger.” However, when he finally decides to ‘pause’ the game in the Chinese Restaurant (the
location of the amphibious lunch), he becomes confronted with the fact that there is no way to
tell whether or not he is, in fact, in his ‘real’ body. Hal Foster sums up perfectly what Pikul’s
anxiety has to do with the abject.
“According to Kristeva, the abject is what I must get rid of in order to be an I at all. It is a phantasmatic substance not only alien to the subject but intimate with ittoo much so in fact, and this over proximity produces panic in the subject. In this way the abject touches on the fragility of our boundaries, of the spatial distinction between our insides and outsides as well as the temporal passage between the maternal body and the paternal law. Both spatially and temporally, then, abjection is a condition in which subjecthood is troubled, “where meaning collapses.” 13
13 Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic”, 114
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This spatial distinction between our insides and our outsides is what is at stake for Pikul here.
Inside of the game, he is no longer able to differentiate his interiority from his exteriority, and
thus is confronted with a sense of the abject.
This concern only grows deeper for him as the film
goes on. Near the end of the film, Pikul and Allegra
leave the game world of eXistenZ, only to discover
that they may not have left the game at all, due to
her game pod has carried over an illness into the
real world that had originated in the game. Allegra
calls this a “reality bleed through effect”. They
have very little time to meditate on this new development, as they are soon interrupted by a
pitched battle being fought between the realists and those allied to the gaming corporations. In
the events that follow, Allegra brutally and casually murders one of their former accomplices.
Pikul freaks out and demands to know why she did
this. She lightheartedly says that he was “messing
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with her head”, and urges Pikul to relax as he is only a game character anyway. Here, as earlier,
Pikul’s anxiety has to do with his difficulty in identifying ‘real’ bodies, thanks to the reality
bending properties of the game. In this penultimate scene, Pikul is unable to tell whether he is
inside or outside his own mind anymore, and is thus unable to tell whether Allegra just brutally
murdered a friend of theirs or simply another game character. He no longer has the tools to
make sense of his surrounding world and thus it can be said that his meaning has collapsed.
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14 All images, unless otherwise specified, taken as screenshots via Netflix.
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Pinedo, Isabel. "Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film." Journal of Film and Video No. 48. SpringSummer (1996): 1731. Print.
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